Eating Me Up Inside

My weight is constantly on my mind. Everytime I eat, I enjoy and at the same time I feel guilty. It is a way that I comfort myself, and ease the tension in my mind and body. Buying grocercies and making meals for my family is a way that I feel successful. I wish to be thinner, healthier but also do not want to let go of the feelings I get when making dozens of cookies, or watching my husband who has spent his life at 130 pounds, make it to over 150.

I also eat to punish myself. During dark periods, sometimes after seeing myself in a full length mirror, I eat to prove to myself how disgusting and horrible I am. I eat to prove how ugly and worthless I am. How no one will ever really love me and how my husband just feels sorry for me and that is why he stays with me.

During the Sleepover I found women that used food for comfort and punishment just like me, but it came by not eating it. There were several anorexics there; the point ways to dually treat the eating-disorder as well as the reasons why they had an eating disorder. They don't eat to punish some sort of defect they feel inside of themselves and feel satisfied when they are able to control what they do not eat.

In the ward they would be made to sit in the kitchen for a period of time in hopes that the food that they ate would make it through them and nourish them.

Unfortunately they did not want to be nourished and would go back to there rooms with contraband knives or toothbrushes to push down their throats and purge.

The women that had made a life of it were obvious to all of us. They were thin with big joints. Their hair was falling out, sometimes pulled out, causing sores on their heads. They seemed dried out, worn out. Ghosts.

I learned another lesson while there. Starving yourself to death was did not always come from being anorectic or bulimic.

I saw her sitting in her wheel chair in the kitchen. She was one of the thinnest people I had ever seen. Her glasses engulfed her faced and her clothes hung on her. I automatically thought she was starving herself, but she was sitting by our stove, cooking, and later I saw her eating.

I found out that she wanted to eat, badly, but she had developed a fear of food. A food phobia. She had gotten ill from several intolerances she had to different foods. She had gotten sick of being sick from food. She found three things that didn't make her ill, and was sticking to those things: rice, lentils, and some sort of oriental cabbage. She steamed them on the stove herself, while the rest of us ate greedily from the cafeteria.

The calories that she was taking in were not enough to sustain her through the day so she was not allowed to walk anywhere. She would sit in her wheelchair outside of her room until one of us would walk by and give her a ride.

I pray they found their way. I pray that I find my way to eating better, eating because I need to and that be the main reason.